Business Eye: Simple change can be powerful stuff

Alex Pratt, chairman of Bucks Business First

Did you know last Saturday was Pi Day? I guess it may have passed you by in your full on, forever changing life of keeping up with the world around you.

Pi is the ratio of every circle’s circumference to its diameter: 3.1415.and Saturday was 3/14/15 when written in the American date format. What’s more, at precisely 9:26:53 am, we had a Pi Second: an even more magical moment at which the date and time matched up with the first 10 digits of Pi; 3.141592653.

Then at an infinitesimally brief moment just after 9:26:53.58979 am and before 9:26:53.5898 am, we had a Pi Instant, an impossibly short moment when our entire civilization’s methodology of marking time matched perfectly with every single digit of Pi, an irrational number that literally never ends. Wow.

Coincidentally, I also spent a day last week training new reading habits with Guinness World Memory Champion David Thomas. He accurately quoted Pi to 22,000 digits from memory. Wow.

Pi is one of life’s few absolute constants.

It never alters; not with time; not with the size of the circle; not with the spinning of the earth; not with technology; not with an election; and not with The Budget.

What do alter are our performance levels and capabilities, which are themselves driven by our attitude to change, our technique and the tools we use.

Imagine therefore if the next 100 words you read here and now had the power to transform your life and business beyond your wildest dreams. Would you want to know the secret?

We each learn to speak before we learn to read.

This means the way we read becomes an extension of this learned habit and we end up speaking inside our heads, a habit known as sub-vocalisation.

But, what if I told you that your brain is perfectly capable of reading a word in one five-hundredth of a second, meaning you can read at 30,000 words a minute, or 100 times faster? Imagine if you could read 100 times faster than your competition.

To begin, let’s eradicate the process of continually back skipping. Re-reading words slows us up. To stop it, simply deploy your finger to run under the lines of text as you are reading.

This alone will double your reading speed with no loss of comprehension.